Apologies Have Their Good Side
I hope I won’t offend anyone here but have you noticed what a thing we have about apologies? We’re living in an era full of them, yet we continually hear requests for more. Those doing the apologizing seem to struggle to get it right and the ones on the receiving end are rarely satisfied.
Take the pope’s recent request for forgiveness for 2,000 years of error on the church’s part. There’s no questioning how historic it was. Still, he did take evasiveness to a new height. His apology was all broad categories, no specifics. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust: Neither the pontiff nor any of the seven prelates assisting him in the mass mentioned these by name - a fact that prompted considerable criticism, particularly from groups not specifically apologized to.
On the other side of the ledger were the folks who felt the pope was mistaken in making any apology. Some in this camp are followers of the creed that holds that no one should apologize for the errors of those now dead. Others subscribe to the show-no-weakness principle, believing in this case that any criticism of the church could undermine the faith of its followers.
The heat and variety of the response is typical of our reaction to apologies. Consider President Clinton’s experience: Here is a man who has been all over the board on the apology question - and all over the world on it, too. In March 1998, on a trip to Africa, the president said “we were wrong” in benefiting from slavery. The “don’t speak for me, I didn’t do it” chorus erupted immediately. What a sorry spectacle is an apologizing president, cried critics. One columnist sneered about an apocryphal future Clinton apology to Antarctica - for the sin of neglect.
The columnist needn’t have gone so far afield. A year later, Clinton was in Guatemala apologizing for U.S. actions toward Central America. Perhaps because an independent truth commission had just issued a horrifying account of U.S. complicity in bloody crimes against Guatemalans by their government, this apology stirred fewer objections.
But maybe it was the difference in subjects. Slavery is particularly sure to evoke the don’tblame-me response. Just ask Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., who has tried for a decade to get a bill passed to establish a commission to examine slavery’s lingering effects in America - should there be an apology? should there be reparations? - with nary a subcommittee hearing to show for it. That’s because the prevailing sentiment is - as Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has put it - “I never owned a slave. I never oppressed anybody. I don’t know that I should have to pay for someone who did (own slaves) generations before I was born.”
Whatever the topic, a public apology triggers heavy scrutinizing. Consider Clinton’s painfully delayed - and grudgingly voiced - words of apology regarding Monica Lewinsky: Remember how long we waited for him to use the word “sorry”?
The apology watch was especially evident in newspapers - a delicious irony, given what contortions journalists go through to avoid apologizing. Corrections are so cryptic that it’s rarely clear what was the original sin. And, in a distinction lost on readers but cherished among tender-skinned scribes, many a “correction” runs under the gentler label, “clarification.”
Over our lifetimes, we mortals build up immunities toward apologizing that probably start with Mom shoving us toward a bullying sibling and demanding we say we’re sorry when we feel anything but. Later, we’re cautioned never to admit fault in a traffic accident and treated to endless rounds of politicians with their “mistakes were made” evasions, or to acquaintances who are “sorry if I offended you” (“you sure are sensitive” unmistakably implied).
The truth is that apologies are frequently in order and often blessed in their effect - and much more constructive than any self-absorbed fear of showing weakness. And, as both the pope and Clinton clearly understand, apologizing for sins committed years ago by a group of which you are a part - a church, a nation, a people - can have real value.
When we are tempted to pick at good-faith efforts at apology, we should remember that forgiveness is for our own good, not something to be handed out only to the perfect apologizer. If to err is human and to forgive is divine, to apologize is something in between. At least - if you’ll pardon my saying so - we shouldn’t be so hard on those attempting it.